Today I learned that you can't use legislation to force technology or change principles of chemistry and physics, no matter how heavy the subsidy, or from whom the subsidy money is coerced, or how many people who didn't vote for you which you blame. I also learned that economic practicality will trump blind idealism every time, as one is grounded in reality and the other in denial of reality. When a technology is ready and feasible, marketplace forces will ensure its rapid adoption if it is, in fact, superior as claimed. However, no matter how good the intent, a technology that is not ready cannot be forced upon the public.
Your faithful tax-sucking green-liberal Pollyanna,
...and the anarchist-wannabe "you're not the boss of me" teenage-brained script kiddies turn on each other. This is going to be funny.
Today's lesson: a copy of 5-year-old rootkits written by someone far more intelligent than yourself and downloaded after a Google search, plus a black T-shirt and a Front 242 CD, do not make you Che Guevara or James Bond or Robin Hood.
Perhaps you can support your claim that they are using bargain construction where others aren't.
One-piece milled aluminum chassis... can't be that.
Highest resolution displays in phone screens... yeah, that's cheap.
Laptop displays with LED backlighting and excellent color accuracy... no, keep looking.
Intel processors? Same as everyone else.
Seriously, I'd love to see an example of non-premium "bargain basement" construction. But I don't think you'll be able to come up with any.
I would believe you if I saw that standard being applied evenly. But that's not the case. Apple is criticized for doing what every other tech company does, even though other tech companies commit more of the "evil" than does Apple. It's all deep-rooted hypocrisy and the ability of haters to justify absolutely anything in service of the hate. Facts will not sway a hater; truth will not sway a hater. The only thing that WILL sway a hater is their own ego, and if a hater is reviled and shunned and held not in praise but in open contempt, there is a chance that they will realize that the world doesn't revolve around their baseless hate.
Yeah, I know, pipe dream. But what else are you going to do with haters? Can't shoot 'em without endless paperwork. Stupid bureaucracy...
So I can then conclude that all you Apple-haters have personally investigated the source of your motherboards, memory, GPUs, cases, and power supplies of the environmentally-perfect PCs you are using to bash Apple upon? Got a component made by Asus? Foxconn? Any other Chinese company? Yeah, they only engage in environmentally-destructive practices when they're building for Apple.
By your logic, YOU are just as responsible for any pollution and exploitation from YOUR computer components as Apple. You don't get a free ride just because you don't have a black turtleneck.
There is no better argument for encrypting everything that can be encrypted than this.
Yeah, sure, most governments aren't going to do anything with that data NOW, but once they have it, they have it forever. And political climates can and do change. It is not inconceivable that the US will elect Big Brother bread-and-circuses socialists who model their ideas on the surveillance state of Britain, or religious whack-jobs who will simply say "God's law is higher than Man's law" and start criminalizing homosexuality, abortion, titty-pictures and religions that aren't Christian, or frothing-at-the-mouth Greenies who formalize in law the already-existing mapping of "skeptic" to "heretic". And they will be sitting upon a treasure-trove of information to identify who needs to be put in their place.
That's what ideologically-driven governments do. All of them. In the name of "social equality", God, or "global warming", it's the same.
When "being prepared" means "changing the way the entire global economy works" and "the government forcing everyone to deeply alter much their lives" and "transfer hundreds of billions of dollars to generalissimos who blame Westerners for their own tribal civil wars", yeah. Absolute, inarguable proof is demanded.
If a computer model can't achieve observed results with an observed dataset, the model is WRONG. No amount of self-loathing white-mans-burden bullshit or profiteering on carbon-credit exchanges will change that.
Show me the math. Show me a computer that starts at 1900 with known solar activity, atmospheric and sea surface temperature observations, and CO2 levels, then accurately tracks observations through 2011, and I will believe you. If a model can't yield results that we've already observed, the model is wrong and cannot be trusted to yield correct predictions.
Should be noted that often these types of (politically) pointless vandalisms occur as a by-product of genuine civic unrest (peaceful or otherwise)
Should also be noted that vandalisms give police an excuse to use force on the entire group (peaceful protesters plus vandals). Such was the case in the Toronto G20, for example. If I were an unethical power hungry cop who just wanted to bash some skulls in, I'd be considering inciting vandalism myself.
That may be true up to the point where people start burning random cars and stealing big-screen TVs. Then the rioters aren't "revolutionaries' or "protesters". At that point they're human-shaped garbage.
There may or may not have been a few genuine protesters. But if you're a looter, you're meat. Even here in California, looters during riots can legally be shot and killed by citizens defending their businesses. This is because multiple assailants, even unarmed, is considered 'deadly force' and thus you are entitled to respond with deadly force, and if a mob is breaking down your door there is no way to tell whether they are intent on theft or violence.
I would certainly shoot to kill as many attackers as possible if it were my business being trashed and looted.
It's the "Apple is doing this because they're eeeeeevil" posts that are really grating. If anybody else were doing this the praises from the green crowd would be overwhelming.
Even in Europe, Apple has zero responsibility to take your PC if you didn't buy a computer from Apple. But Apple is accepting your old PC anyway, regardless of whether you bought something from Apple or not. Not just that, they're also paying the shipping so you don't have to haul it to a recycling center yourself AND giving you something of value in return. No law forces them to do that.
So no, it is NOT mandatory in most of Europe.
But they're doing it anyway. Is it so impossible to believe that someone in Apple is saying "hey, maybe we should help out with this recycling problem, we've got the cash so let's do it", and that someone with budgetary control said "yes, that's a good thing to do"? Apple isn't making money off of this; if this were a profit canter, Dell and HP and anybody else in the business of making a profit would be doing so.
This is what I can't stand about haters. They're so self-centeredly cynical that they don't believe that anyone except themselves are capable of doing good just for the sake of doing good.
Assuming they don't simply bust into his house, trash it, kill his dog simply out of spite, and perhaps even him for "resisting arrest". Cops think they have the power to mete out low justice in the form of lead.
Thin blue line my ass. These aren't cops. They're armed criminals and should be dealt with on that basis. The Second defends the First.
"remain unobserved"? What social network DOESN'T observe your every last move, data-mine your communications, and sell the resulting package to any and all comers?
Seriously, do people think that you'll somehow have less privacy on Google+ than you currently have on Facebook or Twitter?
Blizzard is allowing real-money auctions. Requiring an online connection is a check against cheating to create a flood of premium items for sale, as the transferable items will have Blizz-generated GUIDs and the ability to track whether they were legitimately obtained.
The policy exists because so many people are dishonest to the core (don't believe me? Check the responses elsewhere in this article where people announce their intent to scam, hack, and pirate). It's not anti-piracy, it's anti-fraud. If you don't like it, take it out on the cheaters and scammers who are trying to take your money. I suggest breaking fingers.
If I have to choose between Little Timmy getting buggered by Uncle Slippyfist, and the integrity of the 4th Amendment and protection against McCarthy 2.0, well, Little Timmy had better grease up. On a national level, yes it IS worth enduring the existence of "that kind of picture", because cops with carte blanche to invade anyone's home and lives at their whim is far more harmful than child porn.
Think of the children? How about thinking of leaving them a country that isn't the most totalitarian Big Brother society in the world? How about leaving the children a society which is not going to require armed revolution to remain worth living in?
Many of the malware packages which are out in the wild, successfully infecting people, are kit-based. If someone uses a virus construction kit, it's pretty easy to detect anything created by that kit. The reason that these script-kiddie packages work is that people don't patch and don't keep their AV software, if they have any, current. Given the large number of people who fall into that category, polymorphism is irrelevant, and if you can fool (or numb) someone into clicking Yes on Grant Admin Privileges, nothing in the world is going to save that person.
So, unless a malware author is good (most aren't), or is targeting a specific organization, they just don't care whether AV catches their package, because they won't be coming into AV often enough to matter.
Contrary to what a sensationalist press corps would have you believe, there aren't that many people capable of writing original, robust viruses or exploit packages. The ones who do tend to be on the payroll of large organized crime groups, and don't release their code to other would-be botnet herders. When something new and effective does come out (which isn't all that often), it will spread quickly, but it's just the one package.
Having seen first-hand from my time working at McAfee and a not-named-here IDS company, I can say with certainty that the overwhelming majority of infections use a small handful of vulnerabilities which have been known for a while (count the number of variants of MS-06-040 sometime) and simply aren't being patched. Headline-grabbing new hotness is always interesting, but people who don't patch their systems will be equally vulnerable to legacy exploits (so the new exploit is irrelevant), and people who DO patch their systems will quickly become protected as the AV vendors and OS vendors provide a solution once the exploit gets noticed.
Note also that application-based exploits (browsers, Flash, Adobe Reader, etc.) are becoming the dominant means of exploit. OS vulnerabilities are still out there, and in large numbers, but it's the applications that will get you... particularly for targeted attacks. You can tailor an exploit-document to look tempting to your target, and even folks who patch their OS (or let it autopatch) don't always stay on top of application patches. Sure, you patch your browser, but how often do you patch your office suite? How do you know you need to?
As for polymorphism... yes, it's the decryptors (even the obfuscated ones) which are detectable. Have been since 1991. And as I said, it's not signatures that give them away.
I have "just tried it". Got the paychecks to prove it.
The first polymorphic file-infecting virus that saw wide dispersion was DAV (Dark Avenger), back in 1991. It was detected just fine.
Not all virus detection is performed via signature-checking. In the case of Dark Avenger, McAfee used curve-fitting. A histogram of the frequency of various byte values in specific locations within an executable file was generated, and a frequency-distribution curve generated from that. This curve was compared to the curves of legitimate executables and to what the DAV virus tended to create as it altered the files it infected. How well the curves matched, and where any anomalies in otherwise-perfectly-matching curves were, became the basis of determining confidence that there was a"hit". This technique proved to be extremely accurate, moreso than string-matching. While false-negative (failed detection) and false-positive rates were never perfect, they were in the "many 9's" of accuracy. In many cases, this heuristic was more accurate against DAV than string-matching was against other non-polymorphic viruses
Point 1 is incorrect. Heuristics will often pick up a 0-day virus, as will behavior-based (anomaly detection) systems. String-based virus detection is only a part of modern antivirus products.
Point 2 is incorrect, and has been for 20 years. Polymorphism is no more a perfect virus cloaking mechanism than antivirus software is perfect malware defense.
Points 3 and 4... no antivirus software will ever stop infection if the user explicitly grants permission for something to run. There is no functional difference between malware and legitimate software; everything that malware does (from a functional perspective) is something that some piece of legitimate software or another can do. Malware is defined by deception, not function. Antivirus software does not detect deception, nor should it be expected to.
Point 5... yeah. People expect magic bullets. People demand perfection for free. People can go fuck themselves and their slimy little tort lawyers.
And... stack-based exploits are not viruses. Antivirus software is not intended to defend against such attacks.
But yes, all applications should run in their own sandboxes, memory-wise, file-system-wise, privilege-wise. This isn't a perfect defense either, as the software which attempts to enforce the sandbox is itself subject to attack. And there are many components of a system which are user-installed but are not sandboxed (device drivers, maintenance utilities). As long as operating systems and applications are architected as they are, there will be vulnerabilities which are deception-based. The only defenses there are education and reputation.
No, he was arrested for burglary (note to readers: "burglary" is not a crime of larceny/theft. It is breaking-and-entering in furtherance of actions which in themselves are also illegal.). Plenty to cry over.
The "anonymous reader" who claims the arrest was over downloading is, in fact, lying.
The problem is not a surplus of trained MMA fighters. The problem is that there is a surplus of hardened thugs and a shortage of understanding of what a hand-to-hand fight is really about.
In a real fight, the first solid blow landed usually is the winning blow. The recipient stops fighting/counterattacking because they don't know how to deal with sudden pain, and the attacker can immediately parley that one blow into as many unresisted blows as they feel like. If you want to know what a real fight is like, spar with someone where you allow them one free blow before you start to fight back. Until you can function in a situation like that... and you WILL NOT be able to, until you've experienced it a few times... you're meat.
And that's exactly the situation most cops are in. They're not trained, hands-on, in combat where the training consists of getting clobbered THEN starting the fight. Cops have no idea what it's like to have to fight when they're hurt until it's too late. When the perp rings the cop's bell or lands a kick to the groin, the cop folds. Then loses his gun. Then dies.
That's hardly an "anti-cop agenda". But if you're getting the idea I disrespect the combat abilities of most police, you're right. I'm a hobbyist shooter, averaging maybe 100-200 rounds a month. The range I shoot at is also used as a check-range by the police local to where the range is. I am a better shot than they are, and that's not right. Having spoken with police and asked about how much time they get on the practice mat, the answer is almost always "little to none". If a cop knows how to brawl, it's strictly because they practice on their own, or knew before they joined the force. And that's hardly a majority.
Cops are given the authority to use violence in the name of society. I'd rather they be judicious in its application AND competent to do it. Right now, neither condition seems to be met particularly often.
Slashdot Mirror
Dear Princess Obama:
Today I learned that you can't use legislation to force technology or change principles of chemistry and physics, no matter how heavy the subsidy, or from whom the subsidy money is coerced, or how many people who didn't vote for you which you blame. I also learned that economic practicality will trump blind idealism every time, as one is grounded in reality and the other in denial of reality. When a technology is ready and feasible, marketplace forces will ensure its rapid adoption if it is, in fact, superior as claimed. However, no matter how good the intent, a technology that is not ready cannot be forced upon the public.
Your faithful tax-sucking green-liberal Pollyanna,
Solyndra Sparkle
...and the anarchist-wannabe "you're not the boss of me" teenage-brained script kiddies turn on each other. This is going to be funny.
Today's lesson: a copy of 5-year-old rootkits written by someone far more intelligent than yourself and downloaded after a Google search, plus a black T-shirt and a Front 242 CD, do not make you Che Guevara or James Bond or Robin Hood.
Perhaps you can support your claim that they are using bargain construction where others aren't.
One-piece milled aluminum chassis... can't be that.
Highest resolution displays in phone screens... yeah, that's cheap.
Laptop displays with LED backlighting and excellent color accuracy... no, keep looking.
Intel processors? Same as everyone else.
Seriously, I'd love to see an example of non-premium "bargain basement" construction. But I don't think you'll be able to come up with any.
I would believe you if I saw that standard being applied evenly. But that's not the case. Apple is criticized for doing what every other tech company does, even though other tech companies commit more of the "evil" than does Apple. It's all deep-rooted hypocrisy and the ability of haters to justify absolutely anything in service of the hate. Facts will not sway a hater; truth will not sway a hater. The only thing that WILL sway a hater is their own ego, and if a hater is reviled and shunned and held not in praise but in open contempt, there is a chance that they will realize that the world doesn't revolve around their baseless hate.
Yeah, I know, pipe dream. But what else are you going to do with haters? Can't shoot 'em without endless paperwork. Stupid bureaucracy...
So I can then conclude that all you Apple-haters have personally investigated the source of your motherboards, memory, GPUs, cases, and power supplies of the environmentally-perfect PCs you are using to bash Apple upon? Got a component made by Asus? Foxconn? Any other Chinese company? Yeah, they only engage in environmentally-destructive practices when they're building for Apple.
By your logic, YOU are just as responsible for any pollution and exploitation from YOUR computer components as Apple. You don't get a free ride just because you don't have a black turtleneck.
Oh, I'm on a bunch more interesting lists than "Slashdot Libertarian" :)
There is no better argument for encrypting everything that can be encrypted than this.
Yeah, sure, most governments aren't going to do anything with that data NOW, but once they have it, they have it forever. And political climates can and do change. It is not inconceivable that the US will elect Big Brother bread-and-circuses socialists who model their ideas on the surveillance state of Britain, or religious whack-jobs who will simply say "God's law is higher than Man's law" and start criminalizing homosexuality, abortion, titty-pictures and religions that aren't Christian, or frothing-at-the-mouth Greenies who formalize in law the already-existing mapping of "skeptic" to "heretic". And they will be sitting upon a treasure-trove of information to identify who needs to be put in their place.
That's what ideologically-driven governments do. All of them. In the name of "social equality", God, or "global warming", it's the same.
If you're buying a digital camera, B&H have excellent prices and no-BS warranty policies.
So Android requires someone to die before it's successful? Yeah, sounds like a morally superior choice, sure, buddy.
Epic fail at being human. I see why you posted as AC.
Are there any lawyers (as in, licensed to practice law) who are gamers who are reading this willing to take this one pro-bono?
When "being prepared" means "changing the way the entire global economy works" and "the government forcing everyone to deeply alter much their lives" and "transfer hundreds of billions of dollars to generalissimos who blame Westerners for their own tribal civil wars", yeah. Absolute, inarguable proof is demanded.
If a computer model can't achieve observed results with an observed dataset, the model is WRONG. No amount of self-loathing white-mans-burden bullshit or profiteering on carbon-credit exchanges will change that.
Are you right? No. You are not.
Upon what do you base your assertion?
Show me the math. Show me a computer that starts at 1900 with known solar activity, atmospheric and sea surface temperature observations, and CO2 levels, then accurately tracks observations through 2011, and I will believe you. If a model can't yield results that we've already observed, the model is wrong and cannot be trusted to yield correct predictions.
Should be noted that often these types of (politically) pointless vandalisms occur as a by-product of genuine civic unrest (peaceful or otherwise)
Should also be noted that vandalisms give police an excuse to use force on the entire group (peaceful protesters plus vandals). Such was the case in the Toronto G20, for example. If I were an unethical power hungry cop who just wanted to bash some skulls in, I'd be considering inciting vandalism myself.
That may be true up to the point where people start burning random cars and stealing big-screen TVs. Then the rioters aren't "revolutionaries' or "protesters". At that point they're human-shaped garbage.
There may or may not have been a few genuine protesters. But if you're a looter, you're meat. Even here in California, looters during riots can legally be shot and killed by citizens defending their businesses. This is because multiple assailants, even unarmed, is considered 'deadly force' and thus you are entitled to respond with deadly force, and if a mob is breaking down your door there is no way to tell whether they are intent on theft or violence.
I would certainly shoot to kill as many attackers as possible if it were my business being trashed and looted.
It's the "Apple is doing this because they're eeeeeevil" posts that are really grating. If anybody else were doing this the praises from the green crowd would be overwhelming.
Even in Europe, Apple has zero responsibility to take your PC if you didn't buy a computer from Apple. But Apple is accepting your old PC anyway, regardless of whether you bought something from Apple or not. Not just that, they're also paying the shipping so you don't have to haul it to a recycling center yourself AND giving you something of value in return. No law forces them to do that.
So no, it is NOT mandatory in most of Europe.
But they're doing it anyway. Is it so impossible to believe that someone in Apple is saying "hey, maybe we should help out with this recycling problem, we've got the cash so let's do it", and that someone with budgetary control said "yes, that's a good thing to do"? Apple isn't making money off of this; if this were a profit canter, Dell and HP and anybody else in the business of making a profit would be doing so.
This is what I can't stand about haters. They're so self-centeredly cynical that they don't believe that anyone except themselves are capable of doing good just for the sake of doing good.
Assuming they don't simply bust into his house, trash it, kill his dog simply out of spite, and perhaps even him for "resisting arrest". Cops think they have the power to mete out low justice in the form of lead.
Thin blue line my ass. These aren't cops. They're armed criminals and should be dealt with on that basis. The Second defends the First.
"remain unobserved"? What social network DOESN'T observe your every last move, data-mine your communications, and sell the resulting package to any and all comers?
Seriously, do people think that you'll somehow have less privacy on Google+ than you currently have on Facebook or Twitter?
Am I the only one that sees this?
Blizzard is allowing real-money auctions. Requiring an online connection is a check against cheating to create a flood of premium items for sale, as the transferable items will have Blizz-generated GUIDs and the ability to track whether they were legitimately obtained.
The policy exists because so many people are dishonest to the core (don't believe me? Check the responses elsewhere in this article where people announce their intent to scam, hack, and pirate). It's not anti-piracy, it's anti-fraud. If you don't like it, take it out on the cheaters and scammers who are trying to take your money. I suggest breaking fingers.
If I have to choose between Little Timmy getting buggered by Uncle Slippyfist, and the integrity of the 4th Amendment and protection against McCarthy 2.0, well, Little Timmy had better grease up. On a national level, yes it IS worth enduring the existence of "that kind of picture", because cops with carte blanche to invade anyone's home and lives at their whim is far more harmful than child porn.
Think of the children? How about thinking of leaving them a country that isn't the most totalitarian Big Brother society in the world? How about leaving the children a society which is not going to require armed revolution to remain worth living in?
Many of the malware packages which are out in the wild, successfully infecting people, are kit-based. If someone uses a virus construction kit, it's pretty easy to detect anything created by that kit. The reason that these script-kiddie packages work is that people don't patch and don't keep their AV software, if they have any, current. Given the large number of people who fall into that category, polymorphism is irrelevant, and if you can fool (or numb) someone into clicking Yes on Grant Admin Privileges, nothing in the world is going to save that person.
So, unless a malware author is good (most aren't), or is targeting a specific organization, they just don't care whether AV catches their package, because they won't be coming into AV often enough to matter.
Contrary to what a sensationalist press corps would have you believe, there aren't that many people capable of writing original, robust viruses or exploit packages. The ones who do tend to be on the payroll of large organized crime groups, and don't release their code to other would-be botnet herders. When something new and effective does come out (which isn't all that often), it will spread quickly, but it's just the one package.
Having seen first-hand from my time working at McAfee and a not-named-here IDS company, I can say with certainty that the overwhelming majority of infections use a small handful of vulnerabilities which have been known for a while (count the number of variants of MS-06-040 sometime) and simply aren't being patched. Headline-grabbing new hotness is always interesting, but people who don't patch their systems will be equally vulnerable to legacy exploits (so the new exploit is irrelevant), and people who DO patch their systems will quickly become protected as the AV vendors and OS vendors provide a solution once the exploit gets noticed.
Note also that application-based exploits (browsers, Flash, Adobe Reader, etc.) are becoming the dominant means of exploit. OS vulnerabilities are still out there, and in large numbers, but it's the applications that will get you... particularly for targeted attacks. You can tailor an exploit-document to look tempting to your target, and even folks who patch their OS (or let it autopatch) don't always stay on top of application patches. Sure, you patch your browser, but how often do you patch your office suite? How do you know you need to?
As for polymorphism... yes, it's the decryptors (even the obfuscated ones) which are detectable. Have been since 1991. And as I said, it's not signatures that give them away.
I have "just tried it". Got the paychecks to prove it.
The first polymorphic file-infecting virus that saw wide dispersion was DAV (Dark Avenger), back in 1991. It was detected just fine.
Not all virus detection is performed via signature-checking. In the case of Dark Avenger, McAfee used curve-fitting. A histogram of the frequency of various byte values in specific locations within an executable file was generated, and a frequency-distribution curve generated from that. This curve was compared to the curves of legitimate executables and to what the DAV virus tended to create as it altered the files it infected. How well the curves matched, and where any anomalies in otherwise-perfectly-matching curves were, became the basis of determining confidence that there was a"hit". This technique proved to be extremely accurate, moreso than string-matching. While false-negative (failed detection) and false-positive rates were never perfect, they were in the "many 9's" of accuracy. In many cases, this heuristic was more accurate against DAV than string-matching was against other non-polymorphic viruses
Point 1 is incorrect. Heuristics will often pick up a 0-day virus, as will behavior-based (anomaly detection) systems. String-based virus detection is only a part of modern antivirus products.
Point 2 is incorrect, and has been for 20 years. Polymorphism is no more a perfect virus cloaking mechanism than antivirus software is perfect malware defense.
Points 3 and 4... no antivirus software will ever stop infection if the user explicitly grants permission for something to run. There is no functional difference between malware and legitimate software; everything that malware does (from a functional perspective) is something that some piece of legitimate software or another can do. Malware is defined by deception, not function. Antivirus software does not detect deception, nor should it be expected to.
Point 5... yeah. People expect magic bullets. People demand perfection for free. People can go fuck themselves and their slimy little tort lawyers.
And... stack-based exploits are not viruses. Antivirus software is not intended to defend against such attacks.
But yes, all applications should run in their own sandboxes, memory-wise, file-system-wise, privilege-wise. This isn't a perfect defense either, as the software which attempts to enforce the sandbox is itself subject to attack. And there are many components of a system which are user-installed but are not sandboxed (device drivers, maintenance utilities). As long as operating systems and applications are architected as they are, there will be vulnerabilities which are deception-based. The only defenses there are education and reputation.
Burglary, among other things.
No, he was arrested for burglary (note to readers: "burglary" is not a crime of larceny/theft. It is breaking-and-entering in furtherance of actions which in themselves are also illegal.). Plenty to cry over.
The "anonymous reader" who claims the arrest was over downloading is, in fact, lying.
The problem is not a surplus of trained MMA fighters. The problem is that there is a surplus of hardened thugs and a shortage of understanding of what a hand-to-hand fight is really about.
In a real fight, the first solid blow landed usually is the winning blow. The recipient stops fighting/counterattacking because they don't know how to deal with sudden pain, and the attacker can immediately parley that one blow into as many unresisted blows as they feel like. If you want to know what a real fight is like, spar with someone where you allow them one free blow before you start to fight back. Until you can function in a situation like that... and you WILL NOT be able to, until you've experienced it a few times... you're meat.
And that's exactly the situation most cops are in. They're not trained, hands-on, in combat where the training consists of getting clobbered THEN starting the fight. Cops have no idea what it's like to have to fight when they're hurt until it's too late. When the perp rings the cop's bell or lands a kick to the groin, the cop folds. Then loses his gun. Then dies.
That's hardly an "anti-cop agenda". But if you're getting the idea I disrespect the combat abilities of most police, you're right. I'm a hobbyist shooter, averaging maybe 100-200 rounds a month. The range I shoot at is also used as a check-range by the police local to where the range is. I am a better shot than they are, and that's not right. Having spoken with police and asked about how much time they get on the practice mat, the answer is almost always "little to none". If a cop knows how to brawl, it's strictly because they practice on their own, or knew before they joined the force. And that's hardly a majority.
Cops are given the authority to use violence in the name of society. I'd rather they be judicious in its application AND competent to do it. Right now, neither condition seems to be met particularly often.